Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.

It sounds like a fun challenge.

It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever.

Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) ....

That's where I'd want to nope out.

It can be demoralizing to work on anything that’s against the end user’s satisfaction, regardless of whether it’s actually evil.

I remember working as a junior developer on a desktop app that had so many fatal bugs that it crashed very often. Instead of being given the time needed to fix the crashes, I was told to build this watchdog ‘launcher’ EXE that would simply re-run the application every time it crashed, restoring its state, in the hopes of fooling the user into believing it doesn’t crash so much.

Was it technically interesting for a freshly minted engineer? Yea! Was it soul crushing to be working on an obviously half-assed attempt to mollify angry users instead of making them happy? Yes.

I was also asked to write code that cheated benchmarks. Definitely had a “what-am-I-doing-with-my-life” moment.